I’ve been engaged in an interesting thread on the Small Wars Council entitled Revising FM 3-24: What needs to change? While the thread is interesting in and of itself, at least if one is interested in Counter-Insurgency (COIN) doctrine, it is also interesting for another reason - the unspoken assumptions that underly both the doctrine and the thoughts of some of its opponents. I’ll admit that my thinking about those underlying assumptions was prompted by two factors. First, a totally unrelated post on the Selil Blog by Sam called The Socratic Compass: Giving students directions not answers (definitely a worthwhile read) and second, I am preparing to teach DIST 3901 again for the Fall; a course on theory and methodology in Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University that I teach as if it were a graduate seminar in Applied Epistemology.

Now “Applied Epistemology” is, to me at least, a fascinating topic since it underlies how we as a species understand “reality”. Epistemology can be colloquially defined as “how do we know what we know”, and it is an excellent acid test for any piece of “knowledge” that is presented in any format. Part of the utility of it lies in identifying what might be termed the scope of a piece of knowledge, i.e. where it works well, where it works moderately well and where it fails. For example, a hammer is an excellent tool for some things, usable (but not the best) in other situations and useless in many other situations.

Applied Epistemology uses examples of intellectual “tools” - theories, methodologies, etc. - to put students in a situation where they should be able to develop the ability to choose the right tool for a particular job while, at the same time, encouraging them to reflect on how they, as individuals, define the boundaries of that “job”. The goal - “learning objective” in the politically correct verbiage of the times - is to place students into situations where they must not only know how to use a given tool but also why they have chosen that particular tool and what its benefits and drawbacks are. The ultimate goal, and there is no PC verbiage for it, is to increase the range of choice - the “freedom” - of the student when they are engaged in intellectual work.

Such a goal is, of course, highly subversive of the established order. After all, if people can think, and choose, for themselves, why should they listen to (and give social reverence and power to) the Established Order (in whatever its current incarnation[s] may be)? It is also, potentially, dangerous. After all, consider the fate of Socrates who is, after all, one of the foremost figures in the hagiography of applied epistemology. By way of a linguistic example, consider that the English word “heretic” is derived from the Greek word heresis, meaning to choose.

Returning to the discursive environment of the COIN debate, it is often characterized as either a “Clash of Civilizations” (Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1993; Wikipedia, Full text) or as a “war of ideas / ideologies”. What I find intriguing about the “debate” is that it is a debate on which interpretation is “true” and not a debate on why we perceive events in absolutist terms. As such, I fully agree with the “war of ideas” camp; I just reject both of the alternative models as being “true”.

Being somewhat of a specialist in religious symbol systems, I would characterize the “debate” as a form of Dualism - a pattern of perception that is ingrained in both Christianity and Islam. Dualism is another term for what Levi-Strauss called a “Binary Opposition” and what mathematicians call “crisp set theory”. It is the either/or categorization of perceived phenomena. At a perceptual level, it reinforces what, in logic, is termed the rule of the excluded third; reinforcing a stark choice between one of two alternatives and requiring the subservient acceptance of one of these two alternatives. At the social level, it requires that individuals unthinkingly accept the “truth” of one position or the other and provides condign punishment for those who do not.

It is when we return to the social level that we come back to COIN doctrine. An insurgency / counter-insurgency is the social playing out of this war of ideas - dualism incarnate in the fight for the “hearts and minds” of a population. It is also often a war between epistemologies, although that is frequently hidden in the framing of the discursive environment. Consider, if you will, one of the more famous COIN campaigns: the Albigensian Crusade. This was a very clear fight between two different, and competing, epistemologies one (the Albigensians) based on personal experience and the other (Northern French / Roman Catholic) based on an “Authoritative Word” (an Authority Ranking model in Fiske’s terms). This “crusade” was a clear fight between a group that held power and controlled thought and another which believed in individual discovery and choice; in other words, “heretics” who had the audacity to choose for themselves and treat the then-Established Order as “unneccessary and irrelevant”.

The two COIN campaigns in the news today, Iraq and Afghanistan, are much less clear-cut than the Albigensian Crusade, despite attempts by certain groups to appropriate a rhetoric of freedom and choice. While AQ, and the Taliban, are most certainly operating using a highly restrictive ideology, so too are major political elements behind the NATO (Afghanistan) and MNF (Iraq) forces, and this shows up in the current COIN doctrine in the un-critical adoption of certain assumptions about social institutions.

The first assumption is of the necessity of a post-Westphalian state organization as the basis for social organization. Even more on point was the imposition of a particular form of this State organization, a neo-liberal “democracy”. Why, for example, was the current government of Afghanistan constructed as a republic rather than as a monarchy with a parliamentary democracy which it had been before the Soviet invasion? In mature examples of both forms, the social lived-reality of citizens is fairly similar (Canada and the US for example).

However, at the ideological level, they are grounded on very different assumptions about the source of legitimacy - the social contract between the Crown and the People on the one hand, and the social contract between the People on the other. In a parliamentary democracy, “legitimacy” flows from the Crown and the relationship between the Crown and the People. In a Republic, “legitimacy” flows from an overt social contract between the People, a contract that is often (historically) associated with a successful insurgency against a monarchy (e.g. the US, France, Rome, etc.). These are what might be called the “formal” sources of “legitimacy”, but these formal sources reflect the historical course of social negotiations; basically the cultural sources of “legitimacy”.

Returning to Afghanistan, they had a cultural flow of legitimacy tied in with the monarchy, but none from a general compact or contract between the Afghan People. In effect, imposing a republican form of governance on Afghanistan created conflicting lines of legitimacy. The Afghan People did not rise against either a monarchy or against the Taliban theocracy. What, then, is the foundational event that gives rise to a republican social contract? An invasion? Would the US have a working republic today if the French had invaded the thirteen colonies in the 18th century and forced them to adopt a republican form of government? Even more damaging, the Taliban themselves were a successful popular uprising against the Soviets where the foreign fighters involved in that war were seen as allies of the Afghan People against Soviet aggression (in much the same way as French troops were viewed by the American insurgents during their Revolution).

The second assumption underlying COIN doctrine is the necessity of integrating local economies into the global economy using particular forms of organization. For neo-Marxist critics of COIN doctrine, and of the Iraq and Afghan wars in general, this is seen as the inevitable logic of capital operating in the global economy. For many neo-Conservatives, this is seen in a similar manner although the expression of it is often salvific in its form - “capitalism will make you free” - with all the resonances that has with similar statements from an earlier era (e.g. arbeit macht frei).

Both of these assumptions, the requirements for a particular form of post-Westphalian State and integration into the global economy, exclude third (and fourth and fifth) options. One excluded option that has achieved some attention by COIN theorist David Kilcullen is the reality and effects of kinship based social organization (see his blog entry on SWJ entitled Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt). Now, both State organization and integration into the global economy have an effect of destroying kinship based social organization by setting social structural conditions that assume it out of existence (as a note, a similar assumption out of existence operates in the AQ and Taliban ideology). But, humans being humans and having a certain amount of free will, will at times be perverse and “heretical” and say “a pox on both your houses - we choose something else”, and this is what happened with the Anbar Awakening. As Kilcullen noted (emphasis added):

The implications of the tribal revolt have been somewhat overlooked by the news media and in the public debate in Coalition capitals. In fact, the uprising represents very significant political progress toward reconciliation at the grass-roots level, and major security progress in marginalizing extremists and reducing civilian deaths. It also does much to redress the lack of coalition forces that has hampered previous counterinsurgency approaches, by throwing tens of thousands of local allies into the balance, on our side. For these reasons, the tribal revolt is arguably the most significant change in the Iraqi operating environment for several years. But because it occurred in ways that were neither expected nor accounted for in our “benchmarks” (which were formulated before the uprising began to really develop, and which tend to focus on national legislative developments at the central government and political party level rather than grass-roots changes in the quality of life of ordinary Iraqis) the significance of this development has been overlooked to some extent.

Kilcullen’s last sentence really makes my point for me: the tribal revolt was something that could not have been predicted by the axiomatic assumptions that constructed the discursive debate; the tribes as valid and important social actors was one of the excluded thirds. In effect, the tribal revolt was a successful case of reality interfering with ideology; a loud cry that “the Emperor has no clothes!” that, by its success and actions, points clearly to the lack of scope of the competing ideologies.

All of which brings us back to the the beginning of this post, which was the SWC thread on revising FM 3-24 and the idea of applied epistemology. Now, one of the things I truly appreciate about FM 3-24 was its attempt (in chapter 3) to provide a social scientific discourse for the military. This, to my mind, is absolutely crucial since, at the operational level, insurgency-counter-insurgency warfare is all about political and social discourse at its most basic, and bloody, level. All too often in our species history, this type of socio-political conflict has devolved into “solutions” that destroy both the bodies and souls of the participants. It is not only the loss of human life that is appalling, it is the destruction of the souls of the survivors and the effects this can have on their descendants for generations. Consider, by way of example, the “hardening” of attitudes in the perennial Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, or the continuing destruction in Zimbabwe.

Military doctrine, however, is not a “solution” in and of itself - it is an expression of the collective professional wisdom of the military at a point in time. Furthermore, US military doctrine is constrained by the relationship of the military to the civil government, hence the oft-herd comments about all the military can do is to “buy time” for the politicians to reach a solution in a COIN fight. One of the reasons why I was so glad to see the inclusion of social scientific material in FM 3-24, and it’s also one of the reasons why I think the Human Terrain System is useful, is that there is now the potential for the military to increase the chances of political solutions being reached. In effect, its inclusion in doctrine and operations increases the choice of tools for the situation. My concern about the assumptions that underly the doctrine, i.e. the necessity of a post-Westphalian state and the (forced) inclusion of states and individuals into the global economy, is that these assumptions will artificially limit the choices available - as Kilcullen’s observations about the Anbar tribal revolt showed. I would hope that any re-write of FM 3-24 will try to incorporate operational guidance about not excluding a third, fourth or fifth option.